


4x5

by stormageddon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Jess is as precious as she is deceased, Pre-Series, gratuitous inner monologuing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 08:31:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormageddon/pseuds/stormageddon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is too busy trying to remember whether or not he vacuumed this semester to notice Jess pick up the frame, to head off the awful, awkward questions coming about the happy family he's never been a part of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	4x5

Sam is too busy trying to remember whether or not he vacuumed this semester to notice Jess pick up the frame. He thought he did, but then he also thought he'd knocked over a stack of Spanish textbooks last time he was dustbusting the place, and he hadn't had Spanish since spring semester.... _last_ spring semester.

 

"Aww, you never told me your dad was in the Army!" Jess coos from behind him, holding up the picture of John and Mary from the battered, secondhand bookshelf.

 

"He wasn't," Sam laughs quietly to himself a soft, perverse joy at the mixup that rankled his Dad so much. "He's a Marine. Totally different. He’d never let you forget it, either."

 

"They look so sweet. How old were you?" She asks, indicating the picture.

 

Sam looks down, the smile slipping awkwardly from his face as he really thinks about the photograph.

 

It's just an ordinary 4x5, his parents pressed together and smiling in front of the house in Lawrence. Dad's in his utility greens, mom blonde and smiling in pale blue, pressed against him like there's nowhere else she'd rather be in the world. Sam doesn't know why it was taken. Or by whom. He doesn't know what year it was or why Dad is in his Corps gear.

 

Those are questions he would have asked Dean, when he was younger, only be to shut down by his brother's instant anger and aggression when confronted with anything from before the fire.

 

As it is, he had found the picture a few years back, when he was still…well, before he came to Stanford.

 

It was shoved in an envelope, tucked in the back of his Dad's journal with a couple other pictures, all of Mary.

 

Sam doesn't think that John _has_ a picture of him or Dean. He hasn't ever asked anyone to take one, or picked up a camera himself. There certainly weren't any snapshots of them as kids that he'd ever seen, none tucked into the Impala's glovebox or in the folds of his wallet, no freckled faces or snaggletoothed grins peeking out from the pockets of their duffles, or the sun visors of the car.

 

The only pictures John held on to were of their mom. The same dozen or so images, every one well worn, taken out and touched gently, but often, so that even with the careful handling, they were beginning to show their age.

 

His dad had shown them to Sam, every now and then, when he was little. When John was in his better moods. Or had had enough to drink so that mood didn't matter. They came out, were gently, reverently picked up and carded through, rough dates given, sketchy stories explained, nothing too specific or painful mentioned, like tracing the bruised edges of a jagged wound.

 

Sam had never felt it, never would feel it like John or Dean did, but they wanted him to know. Needed him to see Mary, to feel the loss as best he could, so, every now and then, the pictures came out.

 

They'd been in the back of that journal for Sam's whole life, save the first six months. Were still there, as far as he knew.

 

Twenty-one years.

 

The one in Jess's hand is the only one he'd been allowed to keep. It was years ago, and he had thought Dad was still passed out from the night before. Hadn't thought to see if he was the only one in the room before he flipped open the worn, amber leather of the journal, turned past the pages of myth and monsters to the worn, white envelope tucked in back.

 

It didn't take a minute to have the creased paper out and open, to begin filing silently past the flat, frozen images of the woman Dean and Dad had lost so many years ago. At this point, he doesn't even need to have the pictures in his hand to see them, to file through the only images he sees in his head when he hears the word "Mom."

 

Mary in her twenties, smiling in a white peasant top, her face young and carefree. Mary, holding Dean, no more than a few hours old, exhausted and proud. Mary on a beach somewhere, eyes hidden beneath sunglasses, stretched out on a towel. Mary and John, together and smiling in the suburbs of Lawrence.

 

It's the last one that's in his hands when John speaks up from behind him.

 

"You should have one." He mutters gruffly, leaning around Sam to put the rest of the pictures back in their envelope, and Sam gets a whiff of gunpowder and Jim Beam from the night before, "Take care of it, y'hear?"

 

"Yes, sir." Sam answers, on autopilot as he looks down at the image, dimly noting John taking the journal and a pen back to the apartment's cramped, mouldering master bedroom.

 

This isn't the picture he'd have chosen. His dad is in it, for one, and he sees more than enough of the man on a daily basis. And Sam is probably projecting, reading too much into the snapshot after a lifetime of looking and trying to find 'mother' in the blond woman's face, but he knows roughly when this was taken and there's… not sadness, not really, because she's clearly ecstatic to be with John in the picture, clearly happy to be with her son and Marine in the suburbs, living the dream, but if Sam looks long enough, he begins to see a shadow in her eyes. Like she knows what's going to happen in the coming year. Like she can see the glow of flames on the horizon.

 

"I, ah- wasn't born yet." He mutters to Jess, shoving a hand through his hair, "She wasn't there long, after me…"

 

"Sam…" Jess says softly, seemingly at a loss.

 

"It's nothing." Sam shakes his head, "Just... not many happy memories there..."

 

"Sam," She repeats, and he can tell she wants to reach out, to comfort, but he's about six seconds to breaking already, too full of memories of John, yelling that he should never come back, of Dean, cold, icy fury, spitting and burning and leaving nothing but dead, yawning radio silence in his wake.

 

It had been a year. A year of nothing from Dean, Dean who couldn't let a fart pass without noting it's presence, Dean, who hasn't so much as texted since…

 

Well, since Sam had told him to never call again.

 

Not for the first time, Sam suddenly hates himself, hates himself _so much_ for going there, for putting that out there, because of course Dean would take him at his word, of course he would think Sam meant it, hadn't just said it in the heat of the moment out of spite and anger and a sick, twisted, bone-deep desire to hurt his brother as much as possible.

 

This is Dean, obedient, obstinate, it was my fault, sir Dean, who wouldn't know how to let something go if there were illustrated instructions tattooed on his retina. Who wouldn't know how to disobey if it were the only thing standing between his life and death.

 

Who is out there right now, hunting and happy in his life without Sam. Fighting and fucking and following orders without a hitch, now that his annoying little brother’s out of the picture.

 

“Can we just- just talk about something else?” Sam asks tightly, a little desperately, the loss of Dean, of the family in the picture he was never a part of, hitting him harder than it has in years.

 

Jess, gorgeous, understanding, perfect Jess, just gives him a sad smile and twines her arms around his neck, her hand a gentle pressure in his hair.

 

“Anything,” She smiles, and it’s a bright flash of white teeth and blonde hair, pale eyes catching in the afternoond sunlight.

 

Sam leans in, breathes in sweet shampoo and soft, warm skin, and tries, for what feels like the millionth time, to put his past behind him. To lock the door and close the book on hunting and the life and never having a home or roots or a reason live outside of the next obituary, the next highway, the next dilapidated hotel room.

 

Sam is more than just another knife in the dark or another shovel in the graveyard. He’s not a soldier or a hunter or his father’s supporting cast, he is himself.

 

He’s learning who that even is.

 

And for the sake of that, for the sake of being someone outside of the vendetta that’s haunted him since he was six months old, he can pretend.

 

He can lock it all away, forget the father he hates and the mother he never knew and Dean... Dean who is everything, even after a year of silence, and pretend, just a little harder, that seeing that picture on the bookcase doesn’t burn, doesn’t fill him with too many memories soaked with whiskey and rage, that all seem to end in shouting matches or silent, unaknowledeged tears.

 

If the price of a normal future is lying about his past, Sam can do that . He can pretend that he doesn’t know the words and legends of a dozen dead civilizations, that he doesn’t know how to pick locks and steal cars, that he can’t banish ghosts or break spells. He can lock away the fact that he kills. Has killed. Could kill again.

 

For a normal life. For the soft, sweet girl in his arms, he can pretend. Can forget.

 

Even if the forgetting, like the happy family in the photo, is a lie.

 


End file.
